With lead dust from " splatter " boxes, you often need to use a sluice box to sort the lead from the sand. Then you have to dry the lead out well, before melting. Its not as hard as it sounds. If you protect the drain from the sluice box with a screen in which you also put coffee filters. or cheesecloth, you will keep lead out of the sewer system, too. The lead dust will precipitate to the bottom of the sluice, separating from the lighter sands.
The worry about polluting the environment is rather disingenuous, BTW. Almost every where in this country, you find either Iron or Calcium deposits in the soils, and both quickly and easily combine with lead to form harmless oxides that coat the lead, preventing lead " pollution ". There are Lead mines In N. Illinois( Galena ) and at St. Louis where the ground water works into the Mississippi. No reports of dangerous levels of lead pollution occurring from these "natural" sources is reported downriver.
With the Detroit Bullet Trap, there were lots of dust sized particles of lead. We could, and did empty the trap out, and didn't worry about the bits of target paper that might be in the mix. It burned up as the lead was heated. If we got grit from any target, ( Plastic, glass light bulbs, etc.) whatever didn't burn was skimmed off the top of the pot as dross. We did use a wet rag to wipe down the bullet trap of all the lead dust, so that it would not get all over our hands, and clothes.
Before we had the trap, we built a wooden box to fill with coarse sand, and faced it with paper, and then wood. All bullets recovered were pretty much in tact, and most of the dust produces was particles of sand. Before the "Sand Box", we shot .22s into a large wooden pallet, and also recovered those bullets fairly whole. However, recovering bullets from wood meant destroying the wood in the process. Sand, newspaper, and Masonite, we had, to rebuilt the " sand box ". A ready supply of those pallets we didn't.
If we had had plastic 5 gal. buckets then, we would have used that. We might never have bought the Detroit Bullet Trap.
Steel angled plates for backstops need to be outdoors, unless you can also afford a huge air conditioning system to filter out the lead dust from the air. I have shot at indoor ranges that USED TO have angled plates and sand at the bottom to catch the lead, but most won't pass EPA standards anymore.
For your information, Caswell makes a "Snail " metal backstop that simply deflects bullets and send them into a corkscrew pipe arrangement that slows them down until they are dropped out of the bottom to a collection pit. It works very well with all velocities and types of bullets. But, its also very expensive. The NRA has such a system at its headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia, in its indoor range. The range is open to members.
I know of no more simple, and cheap way to recover your lead balls and bullets than the method Roundball describes. Considering how well it stops even high power rifle bullets, you hardly can go wrong. For safety, always make sure there is some kind of earthen mound BEHIND the bucket, just in case someone Misses the bucket! :shocked2: :blah: :rotf: :thumbsup:
